Of­fi­cials crit­i­cized for lack of read­ing

A com­men­tary pub­lished Xin­hua’s Out­look Weekly Mag­a­zine crit­i­cized Chi­nese gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials for not read­ing enough, and at­trib­uted it to their pref­er­ence for form­ing net­works and their ma­te­ri­al­ism.

The ar­ti­cle said Guang­dong anti-graft in­spec­tors rum­maged through Shen­zhen of­fi­cial Jiang Zunyu’s home af­ter his down­fall, and found his book­shelf filled with ex­pen­sive cig­a­rettes, al­co­hol, jade wares, paint­ings and cal­lig­ra­phy, but only one book, which was “un­suit­able for mi­nors”.

Jiang, sec­re­tary of Shen­zhen city’s CPC com­mit­tee of po­lit­i­cal and law af­fairs, was typ­i­cal of mod­ern-day Com­mu­nist Party of­fi­cials, who showed lit­tle in­ter­est in read­ing, the ar­ti­cle said.

In a 2014 sur­vey on of­fi­cials’ read­ing habits, car­ried out by the Cen­tral Party School in Bei­jing, 71 per­cent of Party of­fi­cials rated their read­ing habits as “so-so”, while 12 per­cent rated them “poor” or “very poor”. Only 17 per­cent rated them “good” or “very good”.